JavaScript War: Prologue

Be strong young Jedi. This war will begin shortly. You can try to keep you jdk under your pillow, but the html5 will hit you in the middle of the night. And a knife in the dark will rise from shadow: JavaScript

In the last years, a lot of things happen. Let me try to organize them, so you will be prepared, young jedi

Javscript is gaining a strong momentum. JQuery, Node.js are peak example of what you can do with this old language.

[…]the new Windows 8 touch-friendly immersive style would use a developer platform not based on .NET, which Microsoft has been championing for the past decade. Instead, it would use HTML5 and JavaScript.[…]

Java JDK 1.6 has already inside a Rhino Javascript engine. It is quite old, but it is “for free”.
Java JDK 1.7 introduced a new set of bytecodes for optimizing dynamic languages. And guess what? Rhino Javascript engine included in JDK 1.7 is the “pathfinder” for this new feature. So not only JDK 1.7 has Javascript, but it is even optimized with ad hoc bytecode!

– Dash (high risk/high reward): Develop a new language (called Dash) that aims to maintain the dynamic nature of Javascript but have a better performance profile and be amenable to tooling for large projects. Push for Dash to become an open standard and be adopted by other browsers. Developers using Dash tooling will be able to use a cross-compiler to target Javascript for browsers that do not support Dash natively.

So what we will see in the next year? Hard to predict! But now every browser you can download for free, has a very dynamic optimized language in it. Javascript will be the next “write onece, run everyware” language. But instead of a clear defined type system, Javascript offers functional-closure and high GUI integration.